Browsing by Subject "Political Science"

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21st Century media effects: choice, predispositions, and their impact on agenda setting and priming.
(2009-12) Holmes, Justin Whitely
In the past 25 years, we have seen a massive shift to communication technologies that allow increased choice of content for citizens. Using an experiment, this study explores the relationship between individual differences, increased choice, and media effects such as agenda setting and priming. It finds that increased choice greatly attenuates both attention to political news and subsequent priming and framing effects.
Action in concert: recasting democratic practices as political friendship.
(2009-08) Çıdam, Çiğdem
This dissertation aims to develop a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing spontaneous popular action by relating it explicitly to democratic politics. Developing such a framework is necessary to address the inadequacies which emerge from democratic theory literature `s conceptualization of spontaneous popular action in terms of an unmediated, direct form of collective political act. A conceptualization of this kind is deeply problematic, I argue, because it opens up the way to misleading accounts that assume the immediate unity of different actors who participate in real democratic events. By making this argument, I am not trying to undermine the importance of spontaneous, non-institutional, and extra-parliamentary forms of popular action for democratic politics. On the contrary, I suggest that if we want to fully grasp and evaluate the democratic significance of such instances of popular action, we need an alternative conceptualization that brings to light, rather than erases, the mediatory political and ethical practices that go into the formation of these events. In order to formulate that alternative, I undertake an inquiry that proceeds along two related lines of theorization. First, focusing on the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antonio Negri and Jürgen Habermas I provide a critical analysis of influential theories of democracy that put popular action at the center of their analyses. In the second "constructive" part of the project, I reinterpret Aristotle's notion of political friendship with a view to construct an alternative way of thinking about democratic politics. Interpreted here as an ongoing activity that involves the collective practices of judging and understanding among different individuals, who deliberate about what is to their interest, choose a course of action, and do what they resolve in common, Aristotle's notion of political friendship makes it possible for us to discern the dynamics of popular action. As such political friendship is a descriptive concept that reveals the mediated and temporal quality of action in concert. It is at the same an ethical concept that embodies the distinctly democratic values of reciprocity and equality, as well as the value of plurality. Understood this way, Aristotle's notion of political friendship provides us with rich conceptual resources to think about and evaluate non-institutional and unpredictable moments of popular action in new ways.
The Amicus curiae at oral argument: new evidence of how and why third parties shape Supreme Court decisions.
(2009-10) Roberts, Matthew M. C.
In this dissertation, I examine the intersection of two phenomena in the judicial world: oral argument and the amicus curiae. I believe that friends of the court who have received permission to appear at oral argument may be key to understanding the influ-ence that third parties can have on the Supreme Court. This project examines oral amici from two different angles: first, from the point-of-view of explaining why they appear in cases; and second, from the perspective of whether oral amici have a recognizable impact upon the Court's decision making. The results in both instances are positive, suggesting that amici play an informational role for the Court, and that their presence does impact both the direction of the Court's decision as well as the votes of individual justices. In the conclusion, I discuss the relevance of these insights for the literature on swing voters and the future of appointments to the high court under the Obama administration.
Analyzing U.S. Media Discussion of Political Polarization
(2023) Dunk, Brandon;
How does the media cover political polarization in the United States, and with what effects? The effects of media coverage of political polarization vary based on the type of political polarization presented. Does political polarization manifest as issue position or affective polarization? Are elites or the mass public becoming politically polarized? Is political polarization beneficial or harmful? Depending on how the media answers these questions in coverage of political polarization, perceived polarization may have different effects. This paper provides the first accurate measure of the media coverage of different types of political polarization through a rigorous examination of media coverage of political polarization by the top five U.S. newspapers over a 27-year period. Using keyword sets to identify coverage, I find that media coverage of political polarization has been severely underestimated by past studies and that it is a major component of media coverage today. Since 2016, coverage has increased across all types of political polarization at a rapid pace. This may have a major impact on perceived polarization, resulting in strengthened effects. I additionally discuss the impact to those opposed to further political polarization and those looking to benefit from it.
The Attitude of the Conservatives Toward England's Foreign Policy 1895-1914
(1918-06) Jacobsen, Gertrude Anna
The battleground effect: how the Electoral College shapes post-election political attitudes and behavior.
(2009-08) Hendriks, Henriët
Every four years, Americans elect a president through the curious institution called the Electoral College. As a result of its structure, which prioritizes states over individual votes, presidential candidates focus on only a handful of states, the so-called battleground states, while virtually ignoring the rest of the country. In this dissertation, I examine the consequences of this campaign strategy for voters' post-election attitudes toward politics and U.S. senators' voting behavior immediately after the election. Using public opinion data from the National Election Studies and the National Annenberg Election Survey, I find that the differences in levels of trust, efficacy, and interest between safe and battleground state residents are minimal. However, when accounting for differences in states' political cultures, I detect battleground effects. Voters living in states with more traditional political cultures are hardly affected by candidates' battleground strategies whereas voters in states with moralistic political cultures are more efficacious, trusting, and interested in politics when their state is also a battleground state. The particulars of presidential campaign strategies also subtly affect senators' roll call voting. Senators who share the president's party and represent battleground states are slightly more supportive of presidential policy positions than those representing safe states. I propose that these senators returned favors they enjoyed during the campaign season. Moreover, if they ran for reelection themselves, they are even more supportive. This dissertation shows candidates' battleground strategies have effects that extend beyond Election Day at both the elite and mass levels, thereby expanding our conception and understanding of the role of presidential elections and campaign effects in American politics.
A Comparative Study of State Compulsory Attendance Laws and of Provisions for Their Enforcement; Together with a Brief Historical Survey of Attendance Legislation in Certain Selected States
(1922-06) Grimes, Lucy Adella
A conceptual history of equal opportunit: debating the limits of acceptable inequality in U.S. history
(2008-08) Illuzzi, Michael Joseph
My dissertation addresses the political problem of economic inequality, through a conceptual history of the phrase “equal opportunity,” and an evaluation of the role equal opportunity has played in debates about how (or even whether) to remedy economic inequalities. I analyzed thousands of U.S. newspapers spanning over 90 years to identify how different conceptual uses affected policy decisions made at different key periods in American history. From the Gilded Age, when reform advocates pushed equal opportunity into mainstream newspaper debates for the first time, to the 1960s when political actors made equal opportunity the preferred way to talk about most inequalities, political actors and analysts increasingly used equal opportunity as the criterion for identifying unjust inequalities that required political attention. Equal opportunity has been institutionalized in American law, governmental regulations, and popular discourse through events such as the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Despite these policy advances, and despite the solidity of support for equal opportunity in American political thought and popular discourse, I argue that the concept has ironically impeded efforts to address economic inequality. This is because equal opportunity invokes a metaphor that obscures the most important sources of economic inequality. Equal opportunity functions by invoking the metaphor of everyone being permitted to compete in a race. Yet most political interventions to address economic inequalities focus on historical and institutional disadvantages in laws passed in previous years. Arguing that reforms should “make up the lost ground” such disadvantages imposed under the rubric of a competitive race, however, violates Americans’ basic everyday understanding of fair competition. We do not give runners in a race a head start because they were born into poverty and had worse nutrition and we do not give a basketball team more points to start a game because they have fewer taller players. While equal opportunity provided many American political actors with an effective conceptual frame to fight some forms of discriminations, it was nonetheless ill-suited practically and normatively to address economic inequality.
Decision making in the U.S. Senate.
(2009-06) Treul, Sarah Ann
Political parties, roll call votes, and agenda formation are some of the prominent areas of research focusing on the U.S. Congress. Much pervious work, however, focuses on the U.S. House. Scholarship is only beginning to turn its attention to the U.S. Senate. The three essays contained within demonstrate the important role that institutions and individuals play in determining the floor's agenda in the U.S. Senate.
Democratic politics in an age of globalization: The impact of political skills and institutions on barriers to foreign direct investment.
(2010-08) Owen, Erica Lynn
Foreign direct investment (FDI) is a driving force behind globalization; in the last 20 years, growth in FDI flows has outpaced growth in international trade. Although developed democracies are generally open to FDI, levels of restrictions vary within and across countries because governments restrict some industries and not others. I argue that variation in barriers to FDI in developed democracies is a function of the interaction of economic and political skills and electoral rules. Because the entry of foreign firms through FDI increases competition in the market of the host country, the distributional consequences of FDI determine who supports and opposes barriers to investment. I argue that this market competition tends to set up political competition between economically skilled and unskilled labor, because inward FDI tends to benefit the former over the latter. However, the distribution of economic skills alone cannot explain the emergence of barriers to FDI. Groups that are politically skilled, that is, informed and organized, are more likely to achieve favorable policy outcomes. I expect that when economically unskilled workers are highly politically skilled, we are likely to see more barriers to investment than when they are not politically skilled. Barriers to investment are also shaped by electoral rules, which determine the extent to which politicians will cater to narrow versus broad interests. I expect that proportional representation systems will be more open to FDI overall and also that political skills play a smaller role in proportional representation systems than majoritarian ones. In analyses of barriers at the industry-level in the United States, as well overall openness cross-nationally, I find strong support for the hypothesis that the effect of economic skill on barriers to FDI depends on political skills. Furthermore, I find that countries with proportional representation have both lower overall levels of protection, and also a smaller role for political skills than majoritarian systems.
Development of global prohibition regimes: pillage and rape in war.
(2008-07) Inal, Tuba
Although rape and pillage in war had been so closely related and so similarly justified, there is a 100-year gap between the prohibition of pillage (with The Hague Conventions of 1899, 1907) and the prohibition of rape (with the Rome Statute of 1998) by modern international law. The question is given that women had historically been considered the property of men, why did the prohibition regime that regulated pillage of property not include “pillage” of women? By addressing this chronological discrepancy in the development of these two prohibition regimes, this project seeks to explain two related theoretical questions: The first one is how does change happen in international relations; in particular why do states make laws binding themselves to change the ways war is conducted? The second question is what is the role of “gender” as a category in this process of change? I argue that three conditions are necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime: states must believe that they can comply with the prohibition because non-compliance is costly. Secondly, a normative context conducive to the idea that the particular practice is abnormal/undesirable as well as a normative shock to show this undesirability hence give the final push for the normative change are necessary. Thirdly, state and/or non-state actors actively propagating these ideas to promote the creation of a particular regime should exist. The temporal difference between the emergence of the regimes against pillage and rape reveals the role of gender in this process. By looking at the writing of The Hague Conventions (1899, 1907), the Geneva Conventions (1949), the Additional Protocols (1977) and the Rome Statute (1998), I illustrate that until the 1990s, states did not believe that they could prevent rape in war as opposed to pillage because of the gender ideology that framed rape as an inevitable byproduct of male sexuality. Plus, the exclusion of women from politics like the international law-making process meant that actors to promote change could not be effective. Hence, a normative context and a normative shock to make the prohibition of rape in war possible could not develop.
Dismantling security
(2010-10) Calkivik, Emine Asli
The post Cold War world witnessed the exponential growth in the range of issues and domains that became security concerns. A long list of objects--the nation, poverty, the human, health, food, the environment--is now firmly incorporated into the global security agenda. As the list of dangers expanded, security itself transmogrified into a medium through which we orient ourselves toward life, politics, and the world. In this dissertation, I argue that what is needed is not more security, but to dismantle the whole architecture of security so as to open up a space for a thought of politics that admits the fact that we can never be secure. To develop this argument, I first map out the landscape of the contemporary empire of security and then provide an overview of critical approaches to security within the discipline of International Relations, where I point out the paradoxical way in which the hegemony of security gets reproduced in these discussions despite the overarching concerns voiced about the complicity of security in the orders of power and violence. This is followed by a discussion of the meaning of dismantling security as an untimely critique. By drawing on historical materialist conceptions of time, I formulate the first sense of the untimely as a politics of time that seeks to counter the temporal structure enacted by the politics of security. Then I discuss the second sense of the untimely, which centers on the relationship between critical thinking and political time. I clarify what it means to brush against the grain of the doxa of security by being untimely in a disciplinary context and refusing to write security. I close by elaborating on three different conceptions of politics once the ground is cleared from security and formulate them as three moves that deconstruct the subject, the space, and the time of security by drawing on the works of scholars such as David Campbell, Michael Dillon, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida.
Elections and Partisan Behavior in the U.S. Senate
(2011-07-19) Hayward, Matthew
Senate elections affect senators’ partisan behavior. Senators encounter incentives to display party loyalty, but they must win reelection every six years to continue pursuing ideological, partisan, and career-based goals in the U.S. Senate. Since most senators desire reelection, they respond to credible electoral threats. Therefore, a senator’s electoral vulnerability affects his party loyalty. In this thesis, I examine the effect of elections on senators’ party loyalty through interviews with Senate staffers, analysis of senators’ roll-call voting, and studies of four senators’ careers. I conclude that senators facing competitive elections display less party loyalty toward the end of their terms relative to their colleagues. I also find that the effect of elections on senators’ party loyalty during the last two years of a Senate term parallel the effect of elections on the party loyalty on House incumbents seeking reelection. Overall, senators’ perceptions of electoral vulnerability influence how they represent their constituents.
Emerging Trends in American Politics: The Feeling Thermometer and Partisan America
(2013-02-05) Kain, Kevin;
There is a sense that American politics are becoming more partisan than in recent memory. Frustrations with the federal government’s inability to solve issues facing the nation, heated debates and elections have magnified the attention on the two-party system. The two parties obviously hold different views on many political issues, and because of that there will always be a partisan divide. The question is whether or not that divide is growing wider, thus further dividing Americans and their elected representatives to the point of gridlock and heated tensions. In an attempt to identify growing partisanship, 40 years of feeling thermometer data may help shed light on polarization. If America is in fact growing more divided, we must ask the question who or what is causing this and where are we seeing the impacts? Using this data, I will argue that America is becoming more partisan, especially in terms of presidential evaluations, and that this is a result of the Republican Party and it’s identifying members drive to become even more conservative.
Environmental participation: immanence, cosmopolitics, and the agency of environmental assemblages.
(2010-02) Nordquist, Michael Andrew
Over the past fifty years, environmental issues have dominated political concerns of political actors around the world. Political theorists have begun to address these novel issues, critically analyzing the dramatic transformations of people's relationships with the environment. Yet much of this emerging environmental political theory relies upon an understanding of environmentalism where "nature" and "society" are conflicting, opposite terms: nature is a collection of passive, mechanical objects and processes that must be saved and protected by a society that consists of active, political human subjects. This predominant understanding of environmental questions restricts political participation to humans only, ignoring the activities of nonhumans involved in shaping political outcomes. This dissertation challenges the framework of understanding environmental political question through the lens of nature against society, human against nonhuman. The first chapter asks what it would mean to understand the activities of environments of humans and nonhumans as political, and by examining what a politics composed of environments looks like. In doing so, I question the centrality of the human being to politics, focusing attention on the attachments to nonhuman entities that make possible the activities of what have appeared to be discrete human political actors. The second chapter turns to the concept of immanence as a means of theoretically conceptualizing environments as actors composed of various beings. Drawing inspiration from science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the third chapter develops the concept of "cosmopolitical practices" to represent a redefined politics in which the actions of environments can be theorized and exercised together. Cosmopolitical practices, the sets of activities involved in the political organization of a shared cosmos of beings of all sorts, offers an understanding of agency in which environments participate in the contested political practices that create our shared conditions of existence. The final chapter combines theoretical inquiry with critical analysis of contemporary debates around food, offering an empirical example of cosmopolitical practices in the constitution of resistant food networks. This dissertation reassesses what participates in political practices to force a rethinking of the untheorized activities that nonhumans contribute to seemingly human-only political projects.
Federal Land Grants to the States with Special Reference to Minnesota
(1915-03) Orfield, Matthias Nordberg
Feeding the future: the global emergence of school lunch programs.
(2009-06) Rutledge, Jennifer Geist
My dissertation is motivated by a puzzle of international social policy and norm emergence and diffusion. Today, children in one hundred and forty-one countries receive free or subsidized school lunches. Yet less than a century ago, no state had a national child nutrition policy. Feeding children was clearly not considered a state responsibility a century ago, why is it considered one today? In addition to analyzing this policy emergence and diffusion, I argue that this policy emergence represents an emergent international norm - a norm that there is public responsibility beyond the family to feed children. Scholars tend to explain policy and norm emergence and diffusion as due to the work of activists, diffusion effects or with world polity theory. However, these explanations tend to focus on either the national or international level as the causal source. Instead, I look at how the national and international levels interact in the creation of policy. In addition, my argument incorporates ideational factors into the field of social policy, which has long focused on material factors to explain policy emergence. I do this by utilizing insights from constructivist international relations theory. Specifically, my argument focuses on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to manipulate certain, internationalized, frames, or ideational cultural structures, within their domestic context in order to produce school lunch programs. The dissertation is structured around the historical development of school lunch programs and traces their progress from their inception as food surplus disposal and military readiness programs, to their current use as a development tool by the international community. After using my global dataset of school lunch programs to assess conventional social policy theories, I develop my argument through in-depth case studies of the US, UK, Canada, India, the UN's World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services and the New Partnership for African Development. In each case study I focus on the interaction between the different ways the problem of child malnutrition was framed in each context and the political consequences of the emergence of structural agricultural surpluses at the global level.
For the Bible tells us so: the persuasive effects of religious framing on policy attitudes and cognitive processing.
(2009-08) Peterson, Jonathan Robert
Political elites regularly try to frame issues in terms that will gain them the most public support, invoking values that have popular appeal. One of these values, religiosity, has a long history in American politics. But considering the abundance of religious framing in political speeches and writings, very little has been done to study its persuasive effects. This dissertation explores how religious framing has been used, who is persuaded by it (and who resists it), and how it affects cognitive processing. I hypothesize that the effectiveness of religious framing is moderated by the religious affiliation and commitment of the framing recipient. I also hypothesize that religious framing encourages peripheral rather than central cognitive processing. To test these and other hypotheses, I conduct a survey experiment in which participants are exposed to different value frames both in support and opposition to a public policy issue. I find that religious framing has little to no effect on changing attitudes among most religiously affiliated individuals. However, religious framing is effective at turning off the religiously unaffiliated, causing them to reject arguments made by the individual offering the frame. Further, I find that religious framing both organizes and simplifies the decision-making process, leading recipients to think about issues in religious terms (i.e., to place more importance on religion when thinking about the issue) and encouraging peripheral rather than central information processing.
From words to deeds: explaining China’s (Non)compliance with the global intellectual property rights regime since the country’s WTO entry
(2011-08) Zhang, Zhenqing
What explains the persistent gap between China's de jure and de facto compliance with the intellectual property rights (IPR) norms, despite China's consistent legislative and enforcement efforts since the country's WTO accession in 2001? I argue that the degree of China's (non)compliance with IPR norms should be understood as a result of balancing two factors: the need for short-term economic gains by violating others' IPR, and the aspiration for long-term sustained growth by respecting IPR norms. Based on 17 months of field work in China from 2007 to 2008, I argue that Chinese IPR policy has emerged within the context of the legacy of planned economy and an immature market mechanism. In this environment, only a small handful of elite Chinese domestic private-sector companies are actively engaged in innovative activities -- most firms continue to rely on the input of natural resources and cheap labor to survive market competition. Although foreign business investors in China hold IPR as a vital component of their competitiveness, their business activities are interpreted as exploiting Chinese wealth by economic nationalists in the Chinese mass public. As such, under some circumstances the advocates of IPR norms -- those few cutting-edge Chinese companies along with foreign IPR holders -- are strong enough to persuade Chinese government officials to comply with the IPR norms and achieve the country's long-term economic development goals. However, under many other circumstances, Chinese local governments will protect IPR infringers and ignore IPR norms -- even though they possess the enforcement capacity --because of the short term political interest in raising tax revenue and creating jobs.
The globalization of childhood: the role of law and norms in the global abolition of the death penalty for child offenders.
(2010-07) Linde, Robyn Michele
This dissertation examines how an idea that begins in one part of the world becomes a global norm that almost all states in the international system obey. It investigates the processes of normative development and global diffusion through the study of a single norm: the prohibition of the death penalty for child offenders under the age 18. The dissertation traces the life cycle of this norm from its origins to its rapid global spread in the 1960s and 1970s to the present, when it has been internalized by most countries while also strongly contested by a handful of others. Through case studies of the death penalty policies of China, Ethiopia, France, Japan, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as through institutional case studies of UNICEF and Amnesty International, I argue that abolition of the death penalty for child offenders diffused as a key part of a globalized childhood. This globalized childhood originated in parts of Europe and the United States and spread via the colonial powers of Britain and France. In the last few decades of the 20th century, international law addressing children homogenized state policies, further crystallizing the norm against the child death penalty. By considering how states incorporate a specific norm into their domestic value system and legal framework, I explain how such factors as state structure, international pressure, domestic-level actors (such as NGOs and social movements) and law produce human rights change and catalyze international transformation.

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